The Fields
by C208 Driver
Summary: Many thoughts race through one's mind when they are about to meet their end.


The Fields

"They're making another push!" Ashley yelled over the sound of explosions from harvesters making another strafing run while ravagers pounded them from the distance, perched on rubble that at one time was St. Paul's Cathedral. She had been there once, back when she had just signed on with the Alliance, its beautiful marble now reduced to a heap of ruins. She looked around and something caught her eye, just in the corner of her position, there was a small wildflower growing all by itself.

_In Flander's fields, the poppies blow._

Okay, it wasn't a poppy but it still stuck in her head, the old poem she still knew by heart and still recited it at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month every year without fail. As she poured fire on the husks and cannibals that began closing in, she noticed two bodies slumped against a broken wall, that of a human and a turian. The blood having smeared where they fell and intertwined, blue mixing with red.

_Between the crosses row on row._

As the enemy contact increased, Ashley charged a new thermal clip into her Revenant and fired of a concussive shot at an approaching banshee and then poured on the fire, beginning to down enemies that closed in. Their quarian engineers sabotaged the shields of the mauraders, the turian sharpshooters taking down these abominations. A lone krogan charged a group of hostiles that got too close before succumbing to fire himself. In a brief moment, there was a break in the clouds and Ashely was bathed in light.

_That mark our place, and in the sky the lark still bravely singing, fly._

They had to hold, as this diversion was meant to buy Hammer more time and draw away potential reinforcements from the beam that Shepard, Liara and Garrus had joined to put an end to this God-awful nightmare. "Suppressive fire!" Ashley yelled, as she made another attempt to rally these allies against another wave of impossible odds but their number were dwindling and were now down to their last reinforcements. There would be no relief, their backs against the wall.

_Scarce heard amidst the guns below._

It was another impossible order in an impossible war that saw only crushing defeat after crushing defeat. Shepard had put up a brave front, but Ashley had learned much since her time on the SR-1. Strategically, all these victories that Shepard had secured were only delaying tactics, buying time for the inevitable defeat if this gamble did not pay off. Battle after battle, she had seen countless men being thrown into a meat grinder, it did remind her of the history vids of the 'Great War' of men going over the top into a hail of gunfire with no armor and single-shot rifles.

_We are the dead, short while ago we lived._

If she could go back in time, she would do so in a heartbeat. So much of her life had been wasted on things that she saw now had no value. She sought to secure a good name for family and all the while missed out on the good that life had to offer. Things such as love. What did that Prothean say? Look out on the graves of a trillion dead souls and ask if honor matters. The silence is your answer.

_Felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Loved and were loved. Now we lie in Flander's Fields._

"Keep up…" Ashley began until an explosion threw her off her feet and backwards into the skeleton of a burnt up skycar. She gasped for breath as the wind was knocked out of her. A pair of husks climbed over the cover that she was just behind and she pulled out her sidearm, dispatching each one quickly before trying to stand up and only come to the painful realization that something was wrong with her left leg. Crawling over to where her Revenant had fallen to the wayside, she continued to crawl a short ways to a pile of rubble that allowed her to set up the weapon like a fixed MG emplacement. She began to cough violently for a second, before she once again fired on the enemy and caught a group of cannibals out the open.

_Take up our quarrel with the foe, with failing hands we throw._

Ashley knew she was in a bad way, the coughing resulted in her spraying some crimson blood on the brown concrete she was resting on and her injured leg meant she wouldn't be going anywhere. It was a fitting end for a marine, no matter what honors the council threw on her or what rank she took in the Alliance. She was a jarhead through and through and to die on the line was a good way to go out, spitting out her last breath in death's pale face.

_The torch, be yours to hold it high._

This had to end here, they had to stop the reapers, and there was no question about it. In that fleeting moment she began to understand her commander a little better and understood why she believed in victory. She had to, there was no other choice. Taking out her last frag, she hurled it at a group of husks while she gunned down a weakened banshee, only to be greeted with fire from the escorting marauders. The rounds punched through her shoulder plates of her armor, her kinetic barriers having long since failed. She did her best to keep firing, but her shots were becoming more erratic and her vision was narrowing. If they failed it would not be because of her, she would fight until the end.

_If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep. Though poppies grow in Flander's Fields._


End file.
